Samsung Quietly Releases Four Low-End Galaxy Smartphones

Samsung has revealed four new Galaxy smartphones on the Samsung Tomorrow blog. The quiet announcement arrived yesterday, and these appear to be the updated versions of the previous line of low-end Galaxy phones. The Samsung Galaxy Core II, Galaxy Ace 4, Galaxy Young 2, and Galaxy Star 2 are clearly aimed at providing more choices in the lower-end market, especially considering the specifications that have been released.

All four of the models come with Android 4.4 KitKat, the latest version of Google’s operating system, which is quite surprising considering that Samsung has traditionally opted for older operating systems for their low-end devices. Then again, with KitKat capable of running efficiently on lower-end hardware with as little as 512MB RAM, it seems that Samsung has made a prudent choice. Also, the TouchWiz Essence UI that has been overlaid onto these phones is a simplified version of the regular Touchwiz UI that Samsung uses on its higher end models, ensuring that (on paper at least) these devices should run better than its predecessors.

Having only 4GB of internal storage while attempting to shoehorn the latest version of Android into a single device may mean that consumers will have to rely solely on the expansion memory slot. It could be why both the Galaxy Core II and Galaxy Ace 4 are both capable of supporting microSD cards up to 64GB.

The amount of RAM available to the new additions to the Galaxy line may leave a little to be desired, considering that the Galaxy Ace 4 LTE only has 1GB, and the other having substantially less. How this affects performance will be interesting to see, as there aren’t many low-end Android 4.4 devices in the market right now.